"My first novel ('Failure to Zigzag') is a careful portrait of my mother, who was a paranoid schizophrenic who drank a whole lot," Vandenburgh said during a recent visit to Portland. "She had auditory hallucinations. She would do characters."

Vandenburgh's father was an architect who was bisexual and sometimes got arrested in gay bars. Her grandfather would bail him out, but the money was a cash bribe to the Los Angeles Police Department to keep her father's name out of the papers. In the 1950s, the papers printed the names of those arrested in vice raids and those men lost their jobs as a result. Her father killed himself when she was 10 and she and her two brothers eventually were taken from their mother and sent to live with an aunt and uncle who had four children of their own.

"I'm oddly proud of my parents," Vandenburgh said. "They were rebels, bohemians. The '50s were so staid, and Los Angeles back then was a Republican hotbed. My father hated it."

Vandenburgh and her siblings had trouble processing their father's death and acted out in different ways. She said she never turned to alcohol and drugs even with "a pedigree of alcoholism, three of my four grandparents had it. It was a huge worry. I can't drink. I know that for a fact."

Vandenburgh dealt with depression and anxiety while becoming a writer. She is married to Jack Shoemaker, the publisher of Counterpoint Press, which published "A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century." Vandenburgh and Shoemaker are regulars at Fishtrap, the writers' workshop in northeastern Oregon. She is planning to write two more books: "The Architecture of the Novel" and "The Etiquette of Suicide."

Barry Lopez will discuss the natural world and human culture May 8 in a 20th-anniversary benefit for the McKenzie River Trust, a nonprofit land trust that protects critical habitat in the McKenzie basin and other watersheds in the Willamette Valley. Lopez is a longtime resident of the McKenzie River valley. His most recent book is "Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape," which he edited with Debra Gwartney.
7:30 p.m. May 8, Soreng Theater at the Hult Center, Eugene. Tickets: $25.

Clark City Press was founded in 1988 by Montana artist Russell Chatham and quickly made a name for itself with beautifully designed books by James Crumley, Jim Harrison, Barry Gifford and others. It suspended operations five years later but is back and better than ever. A new title worth seeking out is "A Moon Over Wings," a collection of poems by Thomas Aslin with a cover by Chatham.

Jim Beaver is an actor best known for his work on "Deadwood." His wife, Cecily Adams, was on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" and was the daughter of "Get Smart" star Don Adams. Six weeks after learning their daughter was autistic, Cecily Adams was diagnosed with lung cancer. She died in 2004. Beaver's e-mails to family and friends have been collected in "Life's That Way," a wrenching, uplifting memoir.